Kobe Christmas

 Sorry to have gone quiet for the past few weeks.  Things have been busy.  We expected to spend the Christmas holidays in Suzhou, but a good friend and colleague in Japan had to return to the U.S. for a family emergency.  He was supporting a project identical to the one that brought us to China.  The Japan project was scheduled to "go-live" on January 1.  So I went back to Japan (with Theresa) to try to cover in his absence. 

 We flew out of Shanghai on Christmas Eve and arrived in Kobe late that night.  Normally, Christmas Day is just another working day in Japan.  Luckily, this year it fell on a Sunday, so I did not need to be in the office until the next morning.  Theresa and I had a chance to spend our Christmas wandering throught Kobe's harbor area.

 Though it is not officially a holiday, Christmas in Japan is an event...though a purely commercial and secular event.  You see lots of lights and trees and Santa's.  Even Colonel Sanders made an appearance as Santa.  Not a nativity scene to be found, though.

 Our hotel coerced its guests to follow carefully orchestrated  instructions for open/closed window curtains and room lights.  The end result can be seen below.  (We were ordered to leave our curtains closed, by the way.)

There was even a Christmas tree put up in the hotel lobby.  The photo below shows the tree.  But the real subject of the photo is the three, darling little Japanese girls that were dancing around it in their tu-tus.

There were lights.....

 More lights.....

 And the most impressive decoration of all is shown below.  Theresa had her nails hand-painted in Suzhou before we left for the airport.